13,804 research outputs found
How to Bootstrap Anonymous Communication
We ask whether it is possible to anonymously communicate a large amount of
data using only public (non-anonymous) communication together with a small
anonymous channel. We think this is a central question in the theory of
anonymous communication and to the best of our knowledge this is the first
formal study in this direction. To solve this problem, we introduce the concept
of anonymous steganography: think of a leaker Lea who wants to leak a large
document to Joe the journalist. Using anonymous steganography Lea can embed
this document in innocent looking communication on some popular website (such
as cat videos on YouTube or funny memes on 9GAG). Then Lea provides Joe with a
short key which, when applied to the entire website, recovers the document
while hiding the identity of Lea among the large number of users of the
website. Our contributions include:
- Introducing and formally defining anonymous steganography,
- A construction showing that anonymous steganography is possible (which uses
recent results in circuits obfuscation),
- A lower bound on the number of bits which are needed to bootstrap anonymous
communication.Comment: 15 page
X-Vine: Secure and Pseudonymous Routing Using Social Networks
Distributed hash tables suffer from several security and privacy
vulnerabilities, including the problem of Sybil attacks. Existing social
network-based solutions to mitigate the Sybil attacks in DHT routing have a
high state requirement and do not provide an adequate level of privacy. For
instance, such techniques require a user to reveal their social network
contacts. We design X-Vine, a protection mechanism for distributed hash tables
that operates entirely by communicating over social network links. As with
traditional peer-to-peer systems, X-Vine provides robustness, scalability, and
a platform for innovation. The use of social network links for communication
helps protect participant privacy and adds a new dimension of trust absent from
previous designs. X-Vine is resilient to denial of service via Sybil attacks,
and in fact is the first Sybil defense that requires only a logarithmic amount
of state per node, making it suitable for large-scale and dynamic settings.
X-Vine also helps protect the privacy of users social network contacts and
keeps their IP addresses hidden from those outside of their social circle,
providing a basis for pseudonymous communication. We first evaluate our design
with analysis and simulations, using several real world large-scale social
networking topologies. We show that the constraints of X-Vine allow the
insertion of only a logarithmic number of Sybil identities per attack edge; we
show this mitigates the impact of malicious attacks while not affecting the
performance of honest nodes. Moreover, our algorithms are efficient, maintain
low stretch, and avoid hot spots in the network. We validate our design with a
PlanetLab implementation and a Facebook plugin.Comment: 15 page
Pet Watch
This paper outlines our project of building Pet Watch. Pet Watch is a device similar to a Fit Bit except that it tracks your petâs activity instead of your own. You can then access this data on our website. This paper defines our requirements, how the system works, and how we built this system
Anticipated verbal feedback induces altruistic behavior
A distinctive feature of humans compared to other species is the high rate of cooperation with non-kin. One explanation is that humans are motivated by concerns for social esteem. In this paper we experimentally investigate the impact of anticipated verbal feedback on altruistic behavior. We study pairwise interactions in which one subject, the âdividerâ, decides how to split a sum of money between herself and a recipient. Thereafter, the recipient can send an unrestricted anonymous message to the divider. The subjectsâ relationship is anonymous and one-shot to rule out any reputation effects. Compared to a control treatment without feedback messages, donations increase substantially when recipients can communicate. With verbal feedback, the fraction of zero donations decreases from about 40% to about 20%, and there is a corresponding increase in the fraction of equal splits from about 30% to about 50%. Recipients who receive no money almost always express disapproval of the divider, sometimes strongly and in foul language. Following an equal split, almost all recipients praise the divider. The results suggest that anticipated verbal rewards and punishments play a role in promoting altruistic behavior among humans.Punishment; Approval; Disapproval; Dictator game; Altruism; Communication; Verbal feedback
Privacy Implications of In-Network Aggregation Mechanisms for VANETs
Research on vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is active and ongoing. Proposed applications range from safety applications, and traffic efficiency applications to entertainment applications. Common to many applications is the need to disseminate possibly privacy-sensitive information, such as location and speed information, over larger distances. In-network aggregation is a promising technology that can help to make such privacy-sensitive information only available in the direct vicinity of vehicles instead of communicating it over larger areas. Further away, only aggregated information that is not privacy-relevant anymore will be known. At the same time, aggregation mechanisms help to cope with the limited available wireless bandwidth. However, the exact privacy properties of aggregation mechanisms have still not been thoroughly researched. In this paper, we propose a metric to measure privacy enhancements provided by in-network aggregation and use it to compare existing schemes
- âŠ